Technical UFOs

- by Don Ecsedy, May 2012

Flying Saucers are UFOs. The Air Force referred to such objects as
Unidentified Aerial Objects before settling on Unidentified Flying
Objects, or UFO. On weekends, when they relaxed and tried to be like
normal people, they called them Flying Discs (they were too stiff to say
Flying Saucer). The Disc or Saucer is a Technical UFO, to be
distinguished from other unidentified objects seen in the sky — a
phenomenon that goes back for millennia. The Wave lasted about three
weeks, beginning on June 24, 1947.

Other examples of Technical UFOs were the Mystery Airplanes of the
first third of the 20th century, and the Mystery Airships of the last
third of the 19th. What distinguishes the Saucers from them is that those
object types – airplanes and airships – already existed. Some were
“mysterious” because they seemed to have no existence except in the
sightings. The special aspect of the Saucers as Technical UFOs is that
nothing like them existed in 1947 or before, no, not even in Nazi
Germany. If they existed anywhere, it was in the imagination, and not
only in the imaginations of aeronautic engineers. They were a vision of a
future. specifically General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold’s future, as detailed
in his Third Report to the Secretary of War, November 12, 1945. General
Arnold’s vision of a future of satellites, guided missiles, orbital
weapons and reconnaissance platforms, “push button warfare” and “true
space ships” were the subject of newspaper Sunday supplements and
magazines until the Wave. They were also on the drawing boards of the
RAND corporation (one of General Arnold’s projects) and other venues of
the emerging Air Force R&D complex. Like cartoon characters, the objects
on their drawing boards seemed to have detached themselves, risen up into
the sky and become public spectacles. Hardly anything is more curious
about the 1947 Wave than the Air Force’s obsession with the Saucers.

The Saucers weren’t exactly General Arnold’s idea of the future.
General Arnold was very good at extrapolation. The Saucers went beyond
that. General Arnold might have imagined flights of remotely controlled
drone missiles, but Kenneth Arnold’s Saucers skipped, flipped, and
darted. The AF was getting reports from reliable people (which is to say,
people like themselves, and themselves) who were reporting seeing things
that displayed no regard for the laws of physics.

Surreal as that was for the Air Force, there were nightmarish shadows,
a little man with a fantastic imagination and his followers, occultists
whose mediums talked to the Saucers, and Forteans who, in the spirit of
curmudgeonly contrariness, might not have believed in the existence of
the Air Force.

The Flying Saucers made for strange bedfellows.

Technical UFOs cont.: The Flying Saucer Specification

- by Don Ecsedy, July 2012

In a July 8, 1947 story by the UP with a Washington dateline, reported
the flying disc reported by the Roswell Army Air Field was 25 feet in
diameter, made of wood and covered with a “material resembling tinfoil”.
In a phone call, General Roger M. Ramey explained that the object was of
such a construction that it could not hold a pilot or attain supersonic
speeds, and that there was no evidence of a power plant.

Until this story, the press and the public did not know what a flying
disc or saucer was. The excitement caused by the Roswell AAF statement
was its implication that the mystery of the saucers would finally be
explained. It wasn’t, but we can see the AF thinking on the subject. That
if there were a 25 ft disk constructed so that it could seat a pilot, had
a power plant, and could attain and withstand supersonic speeds, then
that would be a flying disc. This specification was reinforced by the Air
Material Command study of the reported sightings, commonly referred to as
the Twining Memo, of September 23, 1947.

Technical UFOs cont.: The Intruder Hypothesis

- by Don Ecsedy, July 2012

After Kenneth Arnold told his story to the press about sighting nine
objects near Mt Ranier that he could not identify, several people in the
northwest described similar sightings. A radio news editor wired AF Hq
for a response. Of interest is the last sentence, “Security is not
involved”.

Since November, 1945, the Army Air Force’s public relations had
publicized General Arnold’s ‘roadmap’ of new weapons development. The
public had come to expect supersonic aircraft, orbital satellites, and
“true spaceshps”. The AF had to respond to the public interest by
emphasizing that such developments were years and decades in the future,
but to the public in 1947, it had already been “years”. Men like Arnold
and other pilots, such as those in his first audience at the airfield at
Yakima, were familiar with the AF stories as they were found in magazines
such as Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated, and Flying, as well as the
reports of the science and aviation editors at their local daily.

If security was not on the minds of the Pentagon that day, then it
very likely occurred to them over the next day or so. The AF would issue
denials the objects were secret military tests, and began to suggest such
sightings might be “imaginary”.

On July 2, less than 2 weeks after Arnold’s report, the AF would begin
an investigation of the flying discs. The field investigations would be
carried out by the Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which I think
indicates espionage was on the AF minds in the Pentagon. Over the July
4th weekend (the 4th was on a Friday) the saucer reports became
overwhelming, topped by the account of the July 4th sighting of airline
pilot Emil Smith, his co-pilot Ralph Stevens, and the stewardess Martine
Morrow on their flight from Boise, Idaho to Portland, Oregon. A Coast
Guard Yeoman, Frank Ryman, got the first disk photo published in the
press, as well.

After the 1947 Wave, after the AF “clamped down” on saucer reports,
the Twining Memo would confirm the mystery of the saucers. For the US to
produce such craft, the Memo stated it would require a massive and
expensive effort (and that is excluding some of the more spectacular
reported behavior), and since such a project had not been undertaken,
they could not be ours. But if we hadn’t, then who else could? No one on
earth. Thus, the suspicion that the saucers were of interplanetary
origin.